1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to electronic signal processing and analysis and, more specifically, to a Method and System for Optimizing Decibel Data Conversion.
2. Description of Related Art
The method and system of this invention relates to an enhanced technique to convert digitized power measurements (such as 20 log(X)) into dB. As mentioned, the invention of this patent application is an extension to a previously filed U.S. patent application Ser. No. 10/829,858: “Method And Apparatus For The Intelligent And Automatic Gathering Of Sudden Short Duration Communications Signals,” also conceived by this inventor.
The decibel (dB) is commonly used to measure sound level, but it is also widely used in electronics, signals and communication. The dB is a logarithmic unit used to describe a ratio. The ratio may be power, sound pressure, voltage or intensity or several other things.
In frequency analysis environments, rapid dB conversion is an important capability in that the speed (or lack thereof) of conversion will improve or degrade the overall speed of the frequency analysis. In particular, for Electronic Countermeasure Systems, where short burst, frequency-hopping transmitters are sought to be detected, characterized and then jammed, dB conversion rate (and of course accuracy) becomes of critical importance. With logarithmic values (dB), subsequent processing of the signal data can be made by additions and subtractions rather than multiplications.
Prior art methods of decibel conversion used either floating point calculations or standard lookup tables to calculate the dB's. Both of these methods are brute force approaches, which require large resources and/or many clock cycles of the processor logic, thus take a lot of processing time or large hardware resources.